Find My Family History

At some stage in our lives many of us feel the need to "find my Family History" to help us understand our place in the world. If you are new to genealogy then let's get started!

Many of us find that in today's fast moving world it's all too easy to let the years pass by without any real sense of our place in the world or where we came from. Every day is filled with doing, rushing from place to place. We may have long ago moved away from our roots and be living a completely different type of life to those who went before us.

Then there comes a moment that we suddenly find ourselves wondering about where we came from. Who went before us and contributed to who we are today?

If you have always wondered about your ancestors and where your family tree first started, there are some excellent resources both online and offline that you can use to get you started. If you are stuck and have asked, "how can I find my family history?", then the best way to get started is with your immediate family and work backwards.

So, if you have always been stuck with where to begin, and have always wanted asked the question, "How do I find my family history" below you will discover guidelines to get you going. Enjoy discovering more about your genealogy!

Interview Family Members

Start To Find Your Family History For Free!

To start your family tree, it is pretty easy to start off with your immediate family and work your way back probably to your grandparents. To fill in all the details like their date of birth, death, and marriage dates, you can easily ask your parents or search through family albums to find out.

If your parents do not know and you do not have records, these can normally be found by doing some digging in the area where your grandparents lived. You could probably find hospital records, speak to local retirement homes and more.

Sometimes your local Archives office will have the information that you need. Just by looking online, you can access your Title Deeds office and search for your grandparents names on their database if they owned a home. Some of these websites will require payment.

When you complete your family tree, you will not simply go backwards through your family in a straight line. Remember that you will branch out from your immediate family into your grandparents' siblings and their marriages, their children and so on.

Genealogy will comprise of all your distant relatives, so this information is important to get in as much detail as possible. To access this information, you can also do it the old fashioned way and find your distant relatives such as cousins, who can give you information and show you photos of their parents and grandparents. Who knows, they could have some interesting photos and information that you might not have!

Take a look at this useful guide to Setting Up A Family History Interview with Family Members.

Next Steps in Finding Your Family History

Once you have interviewed all the relatives you can find or indeed who want to be interviewed you will have probably caught the Genealogy or Family History Bug! So where do you go next?

Get Familiar with your Local Archives

When you want to complete your family tree, the best place to find information when you no longer have access to it through your relatives, is to go and visit your local Archives office. This huge library of records, certificates, historic books, and databases provides a wealth of information that you will cherish. When you visit the Archives, you will get so stuck into all the piles of books, that you will probably not even realize how much time goes by when you are there!

Find My Family History Online

Yes, you can find most of your family history online nowadays, which saves you a trip or two, especially if you don't live near to the Archives or any other sources for gaining access to official records.

There are hundreds of website that are dedicated to providing databases to birth records, death records, marriage records, shipping logs, census lists dating back to the 1800's, and many other documents that date back to the medieval times. Just utilizing online sites, you can learn so much about your family history and reach further back in time than you normally would if you had to get hold of the records and visit libraries, and source the physical documentation yourself.

Digitized documents make the whole process so much easier and allow you to learn so much more at a much faster pace.

One of the things you might want to take a look at is the free trials offered by sites such as Ancestry.com. These allow you to do further research before you have to decide if you have really caught the genealogy bug and want to invest in a full membership.

How to Find my Family History Overseas

If you have ancestors that are from a different country, it is almost impossible for many people to actually visit and go to the Archives and find the information themselves. This is why the online sites such as Ancestry are so vital because you can access detailed family records from all over the world including the UK and Ireland, Scotland, the United States, Europe, Australia and more.

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Recording Your Family History

When you start out looking into your genealogy, it is important to keep detailed notes and records. Remember that you are now a record keeper yourself, and to complete your family tree in detail. You need to ensure that your notes are accurate, complete and detailed enough, so that if there are problems or instances where you might find two pieces of conflicting information, that you can piece together the puzzle correctly.

Keeping a file of information and records is vital to completing your family tree. Collect photographs, make copies of all the records that you find at the Archives, print out any information that you find online and keep it all.

Also keep in mind that some of these documents will be very old, and sometimes they can be hard to read. It is always helpful to take a magnifying glass with you. Certain Archives offices will charge you to make copies of the documents you want to keep,. But if you are struggling to find the connections and have a large number, it is a better idea to take photographs with a high quality camera that you can then analyze further at home and even enhance using special computer software.

Aside from keeping hard copies of everything, which can take up a lot of space when you get really far back into your family heritage, you can also just keep digital records using genealogy software or even by starting your own family tree or genealogy website.

There are also certain genealogy websites that are created with the specific purpose of providing people with a storage facility and platform so that they can list their information and create their family tree. If you collect photographs of all the important documents and scan photos onto your computer, you won't need to create a huge, cumbersome filing system.

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With these tips you can easily start your family tree and get into the family history quite easily.

Remember that this is a long process and there are thousands of articles, records, certificates and books that you will have to look through to find the smallest lead that will get you that one step closer to discovering something new about your ancestors.

It is an exciting journey that will transform you and allow you to learn new things every day.

More Find My Family History Resources

How To Start Genealogy Research For BeginnersAre you looking to start your genealogy research? The study of your family history is called genealogy. It involves you collecting the names and details of your living and deceased relatives.